


Agabhainn

by wearwind



Series: Verdant Wind [8]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Arthurian, Domestic, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Goddess Byleth, Happy Ending, Married Life, Once and Future King, Post-Canon, Post-War, Snowed-In Claude, Sweet and Sad and Sweet Again, Time is a River, rustic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 15:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29686230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearwind/pseuds/wearwind
Summary: They arrive in Oghma shortly after the solstice. For the first days, he barely does more than sleep.Or: Claude struggles with his kingly ways, Byleth struggles with Claude, and the river keeps calling. Arthurian romance with a touch of workaholism.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: Verdant Wind [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734619
Comments: 18
Kudos: 40





	Agabhainn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liripip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liripip/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Tanaras](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24859198) by [wearwind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearwind/pseuds/wearwind). 



> Some thanks are in order, including:
> 
> \- amiah, who is the Greatest Beta That Ever Beta'd, for General Emotional Support and also dealing with five different versions of this ending;  
> \- Iris_the_Messenger, for entertaining the idea, rightly fearing the Tanaras-esque pain, and suffering snippets;  
> \- verdantstars, for offering a GOOD GODDAMN ENDING after I lost all hope,  
> \- Anam_Wries for straightening up the title, and finally  
> \- liripip for unwittingly inspiring this fic ages, aaaages ago, because the idea of snowed-in Claude was just too hilarious to pass up. I look forward to witnessing your reaction at what exactly mutated out of it.
> 
> Without further ado, then, enjoy!

**Agabhainn**

(or Tanaras Revisited)

> _Płynie rzeka wąwozem jak dnem koleiny, która sama siebie żłobiła,_  
>  _Rosną ściany wąwozu, z obu stron coraz wyżej, tam na górze są ponoć równiny;_  
>  _I im więcej tej wody, tym się głębiej potoczy,_  
>  _Sama biorąc na siebie cień zboczy--_
> 
> _Piach spod nurtu ucieka, nurt po piachu się wije, własna w czeluść ciągnie go siła;_  
>  _Ale jest ciągle rzeka na dnie tej rozpadliny, jest i będzie, będzie jak była –_  
>  _Bo źródło, bo źródło wciąż bije._
> 
> Jacek Kaczmarski, [Źródło](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oIYGed537I)
> 
> _Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—_
> 
> _Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night_
> 
> _And watching, with eternal lids apart,_
> 
> _Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,_
> 
> _The moving waters at their priestlike task_
> 
> _Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,_
> 
> _Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask_
> 
> _Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—_
> 
> _No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,_
> 
> _Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,_
> 
> _To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,_
> 
> _Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,_
> 
> _Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,_
> 
> _And so live ever—or else swoon to death._
> 
> John Keats

**1.**

“If you don’t take him,” Marianne says, carefully, choosing her words with as much caution as though they were tinctures to mix into her medicines, “there will be… consequences.”

Byleth sets her jaw. Beyond the shut door of their private balcony, Claude is dictating a letter to a young Almyran scribe, one of the Goneril orphans he had brought into the court. A king’s favour; but also a consequence of the fact that he is too weak to hold a quill. Outside of the royal chambers, the Throat is unusually dark and silent.

“I’ve spoken to Lorenz,” Marianne continues, her eyes downturned to gaze into the shadowed garden below. Swathes of reed whisper around the pond, a soft, half-drowned murmur suspended between the wind and inky depths of the water. “He would rather not assume the seat, if he doesn’t have to. It is… a responsibility he does not wish to bear on his own. But,” and her white-gloved hand seeks out Byleth’s, squeezing gently against the sudden strain of her tendons, “he would rather do it for a time than permanently.”

The unspoken wraps around Byleth’s neck like a garrotte. _Permanently._

“Can’t you--” she attempts, and the words lodge in her throat. “Is there anything--”

“He needs to rest _,_ ” Marianne says. Byleth nods tightly. The images of the future crowd around her head: a cold, impeccably made bedside, empty teacups, still and stale air of a black-draped parlour. Two banners lowered half-mast.

Permanence, silent and regal.

“I’ll take him away,” she says.

Marianne parts with her with a lavender-smelling kiss. Alone, Byleth wanders blind through the castle, seeking out the private chapel among the array of closed doors. As she takes a quiet step in, emerald-studded locks of Saint Seiros begin to glisten in the oily light of her hand-held taper; but, in the hues of her eyes, Byleth is seeking out another woman.

“Help me,” she rasps. “You said you’d always be with me. I do not want to-- I mustn’t--”

The chapel is silent, answerless. 

Byleth presses a hot cheek against the stained glass. The voice she calls for is long-gone, and even if it were not, it had never been found in chapels or cathedrals. The answers had lain within for years.

“ _Please,_ ” she begs all the same, and Sothis does not stir. 

**2.**

They arrive in Oghma shortly after the solstice. For the first days, he barely does more than sleep.

She dozes off alongside him, but then rises on light feet. Around the little wooden cottage, whose panelled doorway is carved with the Crest of Daphnel, there is a circular clearing stretching off into a gentle down-sloping meadow. Dawn bathes it in rosy light, lighting up the mist that lingers over the grass. Byleth steps down from the porch, lowers herself into the welling fog, and half-expects to be smothered in it. But the circlet of visibility shifts with her instead, a protective array that blurs out the horizon, refocuses her attention on the dewdrops clinging to the tall, thin blades of grass. It’s quiet enough she can hear them fall.

She wanders, silent and hidden in the mist, the woodlands around her turning golden with dawn.

The silence scatters with the ringing of birdsong as daylight climbs higher. The mists fall to wet her boots, sinking into the soft moss and rot that lines the forest. The wooden rod pushes at her back, the buckets clinking softly against each other.

Finally, the joyful, noisy murmur of cascading water tells her that Agabhainn draws near. She climbs down the gully and kneels down at the rock-lined bank, reaching out into the clear, ice-cold water. The chill stabs her to the bone; she plunges deeper still, gathering the water into her palms to splash her face and then drink deeply. 

The cold bites her teeth, slides down her throat to chill the insides. She reaches for another handful before tilting the bucket against the quick current. 

The water tastes - familiar. Nostalgic, in the same way a handful of bilberries could be nostalgic: a memory of large, calloused fingers, stained with an innocent red for once. ( _Here ya go, champ,_ her father had said _. I saw a bunch of those on patrol._ ) Something old and half-forgotten, something kind. A step away from all things that swirl around her head these days; of countries and decisions and soldiers awaiting her orders. Big things, important things, living things; and she is--

She wants--

The water sloshes quietly on her back as she makes her way to the cottage.

Claude is still asleep when she returns, but stirs with the whistling of the kettle. “I don’t know what I could have ever done to this bed and all the logs that make it,” he proclaims groggily, propping himself on an elbow to regard her, “but it seems out to murder my spine.”

“You do inspire murderous moods,” Byleth says, extending an earthen mug in his direction. He catches it with light fingers, sniffs the tea, and nuzzles his cheek against it. 

Byleth’s lips tilt upward at that. He is only half-awake, and sillier for it; a rare sight. 

“Have I finally graduated from inspiring enemies to infuriating inanimate objects, then? All the glory to you, Teach, for facilitating it.” Heedless of his complaints, he reclines back into the mattress and closes his eyes. The bags under them have grown grey, sallow; and even from across the room Byleth can see the few white hairs that streak his otherwise-glossy chestnut mop. They had first appeared during the war, and she still remembers the awful tug her heart gave at finding them between her fingers: they had grown on a head much too young for it. But even now, even five years later--

He is master of four countries and two continents, Heaven Piercer and Golden Viper, the brokerer of a union to outlast all unions. He is twenty-eight years of age. 

One green eye cracks open, an eyebrow bouncing up at the weight of her attention. “What did I do this time?”

Byleth rises to smoothen the thick down duvets around his shoulders, pushing gently on his chest to sink him lower into the feathered depths. He is pliant under her, unobjecting as she removes the hot mug from his grasp and places it down to chill on the bed stand. His fingers are warm and loose when she presses them to her lips.

“Positively… _princessy,_ ” murmurs Claude, his breathing slowing to a languid, deeper rhythm, and then he’s asleep.

Byleth doesn’t rise. His pulse beats against her lips, both steady and staggeringly fragile.

* 

He recovers slowly. Days pass quiet without his chatter, but Byleth still prefers his steady breathing at her back to the frantic pace of their meetings. She had foolishly expected a break, now that the Throat lies open wide; but, much like the ceremonial explosion that broke through the fifty-foot-tall wall, it has only triggered an avalanche of troubles. Internal strife is rife; rumours of Edelgardian separatists have grown stronger still, and troubling reports reach them on face-changers fomenting dissent south of Airmid. And Claude, as it happens, had always been terrible at delegating his deeper worries to anyone but his ciphered journal.

Byleth lights a taper at his bedside. His complexion has grown warmer with time, but only in the glow of fire does he look his old self now. His mouth is half-open, chasing a word that has fluttered away before he’s managed to give it voice; and even in his dreams he stirs, eyelids twitching restlessly under the falling hair.

She fits herself between the duvets and the mattress, head lowering to lay her forehead against the crook of his neck. He shifts in his sleep, pulling her closer. His other hand slips under the pillow to close on a dagger.

“I’m here,” Byleth tells him and wipes the sweat-matted fringe away from his forehead. He makes a small, questioning sound. “I’m here.”

His eyes flutter open for a moment, unseeing.

“Of course you are,” he says, perfectly articulated even through a dream, and the hand on her hip grips her tighter, holding fast to guard against any escape. He falls back asleep without as much as a sigh, and Byleth traces the echoes of heartbeat through the vault of his chest.

Unfamiliar. Fragile. Mortal. Beating out the drumbeat of _time_.

**3.**

When she wakes, the bed has gone cold. Frowning, she ventures out to find him bare-footed on the planks of the porch, cape twisted around his shoulders as he sits cross-legged on the cool wind. A chilly, wet morning sprawls ahead of him, swathes of buttercups and cornflowers peeking from under the thick greenery, but Claude’s not looking at them. He’s - and a chill settles in Byleth’s stomach at that, both awful and awfully fond, because this should no longer surprise her - he’s looking up, eyes fixed on the swelling masses of heavy clouds as if he could dispel them with his gaze alone.

 _Heaven Piercer._ Almyrans had given him that name after the battle of Nasashir. 

“Care to join me, love?” he calls, and from the door she can already see the red stains of a fever colouring his cheeks. “It’s cooler in here.”

Byleth doesn’t respond. Instead, she approaches him with pinched eyebrows.

“Hey-- _oomph,_ ” Claude protests as she scoops an armful of a king and brings his flailing limbs into the air. She marches back inside, balancing the weight of him and all his secret anxieties between her arms, and drops him on top of the unmade bed.

“You,” she says, unmerciful, “are ill. And you will behave like you’re ill.”

Claude digs himself out of the feathered covers and huffs the hair out of half his face to skewer her with a single-eyed look. “Firstly,” he rasps, “I was not aware that an ailing man ought to lose his privileges to walk to the porch and back. Secondly, even if he did, _ill_ is a grand overstatement in my case--”

“What did Marianne say, Claude?”

Claude raises his eyes to the heavens and finds only Byleth’s unimpressed gaze. “Indeed, wife mine, what _did_ Marianne say? I distinctly recall her saying that there was nothing to be done that required a healer anymore.”

Byleth remembers their last conversation quite differently, but lets the argument dangle in the air. Arguing with Claude is pointless on a good day; on a bad, it will lead to him talking circles around her well past sundown. He sets his jaw at her silence, but relents as she gently pushes him back down into the mattress.

She tries to rearrange the covers next, but he catches her wrist. “Too hot.” 

“You’re feverish, Claude.”

“I _know_ ,” he says, brows downturned. “Even so, sweating through the covers will hardly help me. Listen-- I have been bedridden for a fortnight now. Don’t you think a whiff of fresh air would do me well?”

Byleth leans in to taste the salt beading on his forehead, then his dry, hot lips. Wordlessly, she eases him down with her own weight, her shoulders pressing into his, her knees dug on either side of his waist. 

Claude sighs into her mouth, conceding defeat.

“A glass of water, then,” he murmurs. “I should have known not to marry a cutthroat negotiator. Perhaps we’ll send you to haggle with the Morfis trade unions next...”

“I’ll bring more,” Byleth says, standing up. Warm fingers chase her arms.

“Don’t tarry too long,” he says, startlingly vulnerable. Then he falls flat on his back, eyes drilling into the ceiling with restless energy.

 _I love you_ thrums beneath her breast instead of a heartbeat, a steady sizzle lining the underside of her skin. There is so much _life_ in him that it burns almost too brightly, to the point of devouring himself, and well past that; and Byleth will not allow it to flicker out. Not when she holds so little of it herself. 

The forest is slick with dew, dark with rain clouds looming low, emerald moss and black rot bending underfoot. The murmur of Agabhainn is louder this time, and she climbs down to its banks underneath a shadowed canopy, plunges her hands upstream, and washes off her own tiredness from her face.

As she methodically fills the buckets with ice-cold water, something murmurs in the shimmer of the river. Something eerily like her name.

She stills.

“Sothis?” she calls quietly and is answered by a distant rumble of a waterfall. 

It grows louder in her ears, a high, rising note. Not unlike the call that had roused her out of certain death six years ago. Out of Garreg Mach, having plateaued before the mountains, Agabhainn is slower and gentler, spreading wide and steady in its flow; she had woken up on its low sandy bank. But so high in Oghma it is still a mountain river, hasty and noisy and impatient.

 _Byleth,_ calls the river, and before she knows it, she begins to climb upstream along the rocky edges of the ravine, heart seized by unreasonable longing. _Byleth._

“I’m coming,” she rasps, “I’m--”

 _Don’t tarry too long,_ he has asked.

Byleth stills. Swallows a heavy knot in her throat. The blank space that lives inside her ribcage grows a little wider.

Then she hoists the buckets over her shoulders and climbs out of the ravine.

He is already asleep when she walks into the house, still sprawled on top of the tumbled covers like the world’s broadest infant. Byleth lays a cold hand on top of his burning forehead; he makes a tiny relieved noise, pushing his head into her palm.

Fierce, protective fondness rises in her chest. She dips her fingers in the spring water and smudges the glistening droplets against his chapped mouth, letting them slowly drip in between. He exhales in his sleep, licks his lips, cranes his head up to chase her fingers.

“More _,_ ” he murmurs, and Byleth’s lips curve in a desperately sad smile. Always more, and she’s got so little to give _._

  
  


**4.**

“Well, since I seem to be cured now,” announces Claude the first day he walks the length of the room, “we should send for the wyverns before the mountains of paperwork on my desk develop their own ethnic tensions.”

Byleth barely spares him a glance. The smithing stone scrapes against the blade, steady and familiar in her hand. “You know Lorenz and Farbod are taking care of everything.” 

“Gods preserve me,” murmurs Claude under his breath, “if my kingdom rests on a brat that once swapped Father’s hair pomade for cooking oil, and a _Gloucester._ ”

“They will do well,” Byleth answers evenly. She doesn’t mistake his frustration for genuine concern. He spends enough time expressing relief that his youngest older brother has not got the ambition to rule his own duchy, much less the vast sprawl of Almyra, for he would do terrifyingly well. And Lorenz - they both knew Lorenz. He would hardly let the western lords know the difference in figurehead. 

And most importantly, they are both capable of hunting down a conspiracy without raising too much commotion. Most in the commonwealth would not notice the royal couple’s absence, and those that would were told of a long-outstanding honeymoon. Let the assassins believe they have succeeded. 

And a honeymoon, she supposes, this truly has been. A measure of peace, even if Claude had had to drive himself past the far reaches of human endurance to allow it. Byleth closes her eyes for a moment, remembering--

_A man under the archway of their balcony, long knife glistening with toxin. The Sword of the Creator rests in the vault beneath Garreg Mach, as bones and hearts should, so she reaches for a dagger instead._

_She rises from her wicker-woven chair and the assassin rushes forth, baring the teeth blackened with charcoal not to glisten in the dark. The night is calm, quiet._

_Before their knives clash, Claude drives a dagger through the back of the man’s neck._

_“Wait,” she says, “Claude, wait-- why’d you kill him? We should have questioned him first.”_

_The freshly-made corpse clatters to the ground between them. On the other side, Claude’s eyes are colder than a blizzard._

_“Black teeth. He wouldn’t have spoken,” he says, curtly, his mind already miles ahead from her even as he reaches out with frantic fingers and tugs her close. “There’s a spy in the castle.”_

_“Claude,” Byleth says, encircling him with her arms, and it is as if she embraced one of the statues they made of him on either side of the Throat’s gates. “Are you okay?”_

_Claude lets out a grating, off-putting chuckle. “She says, after an attempt on her life. Yes, Teach, I’m well. But I am imagining many will not be very soon, if I only have my way. Which I intend to.” Then, quieter, something in his voice scrunching like a handful of broken ice, he says: “I thought he’d gone after me. He should’ve gone after me. How in the nine hells have I missed this?”_

_“Claude,” she says, reaching for his cheek, but he swats her hand away._

_“Not now. Give me-- twenty hours. Thirty. Then I can be gentle again.”_

_Byleth meets his eye, swallows down the terror that has little to do with the body bleeding out between them. “Well, then,” she says, “shall we hunt?”_

“Claude,” she calls, and he stills his pacing for a moment to throw his head back. “Come here.”

“Do I need sharpening, too?” he asks, obediently sliding to his knees to lean his cheek against her thighs. She casts aside the sword and the stone to dip her fingers into his hair, carding through their thick, glossy texture. For a moment he is soft and pliant, melting into her touch with the relief of a man still only half-returned to his strength; but then he tenses.

“You’re thinking about something,” he murmurs into the pelt of her breeches.

“Can you tell what about?”

“Probably,” he says. “Why don’t you give me a chance to test it?”

Byleth nods. “I’m thinking,” she rasps, turning the words in her mouth in the hopes of moulding them into her proper meaning, “how you’ve strained past your limits to rise to your own challenge. And now you want to keep flying.“

He goes very still against her knees. Only his chest moves in and out, in and out, each breath counted and deliberate; calming himself away from a sharp retort.

“What other choice do I have?” he says finally, and she hears him gentling the words as much as he can manage. “All of this is mine to lose. You suppose Edelgard would have taken her vacation?”

“Yes,” Byleth says, low and clipped at his choice of words. _Vacation._ Claude snorts quietly and climbs up on his knees to slot their fingers together.

“Right,” he says, “right. What do you want for dinner?”

* 

Dinner, Byleth admits, is a disaster.

“ _Fool,_ ” Claude says to the rabbit chop, tasting it with a terribly scrunched expression, “where’s that springiness of your life gone? You would’ve expected at least a little tenderisation from an animal that hops for a living.”

Byleth pinches her temples and ignores his soliloquy for the sake of chopping the vegetables. Even from where she stands, the meat looks tough as a shoeskin, clearly fried out of any flavour. “It’s just lean meat. Shall we chop it into a stew?”

“We’ve had _stew_ for _days,_ ” Claude says, remarkably Hilda-like. “Now that I get the privilege to stomach things again, do you know what I want? I want a beautiful, steaming, multi-layered casserole--”

“Could you mop up the shards first, Claude?”

Claude looks down, where the earthly remains of tableware litter the floor around his feet, attempts to step away, and promptly scrunches a shell of a cat-faced mug under his foot.

Byleth holds his eyes, expression blank.

“...Stew is also good,” Claude says. 

The more he recovers, the antsier he grows. Soon he’s fidgeting enough to give her mild vertigo, circling the bounds of the cottage like he is learning the confines of a prison cell. Fingers drumming at the sides of his hips, he paces the length of the parlour, ventures out to trample the flowers in his circular walks, as if he’s both wanting and unwilling to draw too far away from the cottage. In the night, she wakes to the quiet scratching of the quill as he writes and writes and writes with shaky, large script, ink-stained fingers leaving prints on the untreated furniture, yellowing pages littering the floor until he has no more clean vellum.

He’s waiting for something, Byleth realises. The answer becomes obvious soon.

The Daphnel scouts arrive on horseback in a crisp, early morning of a Wyvern Moon, bearing books and supplies. Claude seizes on them immediately and bounces out of the house, greeting them with a resonant voice. “I’ll have your ravens, good sirs.”

The first scout, a red-haired woman of crusty middle age, dismounts and squares gazes with Byleth before bowing. “I beg your forgiveness, sire, but Lady Daphnel explicitly forbade us from leaving you ravens.”

“Well,” Claude says smoothly, as Byleth sends a silent _thank you_ toward Castle Daphnel, “I see that the coup d’etat is in full swing already. My congratulations to Judith’s efficiency in her treasonous schemings. Before I become deposed and destitute, however, I am still your liege. And,” he adds with a cold glisten in his eye, “I do not believe I have given a _request._ ”

“Claude,” Byleth says sharply. The scout bends at the waist immediately, but before she does, Byleth sees a curl of her mouth.

“I beg your forgiveness, sire,” she repeats, “but Lady Daphnel bade us say that whatever you may threaten us with, she will do worse.”

There’s a brief beat of silence.

“Well,” Claude says. “It would seem that I have been deposed already. Stand up straight, for heavens’ sake, unless there’s something really interesting in that grass. Will you carry my letters at least?”

“I will, sire,” says the scout. Claude shuffles his feet inside to fetch them, his shoulders dropped, cheeks still flush with the exertion of the walk. 

The remaining Daphnel hands lead away their animals, crowding around the back entrance to restock their pantry. Byleth locks eyes with the first scout again, offering a small nod of apology, and then a smile as the woman snaps a Red Steel mercenary salute. “Don’t worry about it, General. I remember when he was still a brat tailing Lady Judith. You’ve got yourself a handful, I won’t lie.”

“Indeed,” Byleth says, her smile growing a little more fond. “Were you with us in Alleil?”

“That I was,” she says. “Name’s Eleanor, sire, of the Red Steel. We’ve been with Daphnel for the last twenty years. Riegan, too, before Godfrey’s death.”

Byleth gives a low, decidedly un-queenlike whistle. She extends an arm, and Eleonor grasps it with only a second’s stumble. “Byleth of the Blade Breaker’s men. Twenty years is a long time for a commission.”

“Lady Judith’s good people,” Eleanor says. “Wouldn’t say anything bad about the Riegans, either. What you did during the war was unbelievable. And whatever the people say about him--” she briefly stumbles over her own words, mouth twisting awkwardly, “--he’s brought peace, hasn’t he? I can’t imagine who’d want him poisoned.”

Byleth stills for a second. She wants to ask what, exactly, people of Fódlan have to say about the Golden Viper that would not bear repeating to his wife; but Eleanor is not at fault here.

The poisoning is an open secret, then. She is not surprised; neither would be Claude.

“He looks better now, though,” Eleanor says. “We’ll keep you safe as long as it takes, so he can recover. How long are you planning to keep him here, sire?”

“As long as I need to,” Byleth says. Eleanor has a sudden coughing bout.

“Good luck,” she says. “Because he’s just taken my horse.”

**5.**

Claude is _insufferable._

He falls off the horse on the bridleway to Daphnel, and only a sheer stroke of luck stops him from tumbling down the steep mountain path and down the crevasse. Byleth and Eleanor chase after him, barely catching the harness around the mare’s mouth before she tramples her hooves over his slumped body. He then refuses to apologise.

“You can hardly expect me to sit here like a cornered rat,” he says, “while my friends risk their lives pursuing a threat on _my head--_ ”

Byleth pushes him in the chest. Not a full punch, not close, but he still falls backwards and folds like a discarded handkerchief. “And how do you expect to help?”

Claude heaves. Then he picks himself up from the floor, eyes alight. “You misunderstand, love,” he says, low and casual in a way that makes each word sizzle. “If physical strength were all I ever relied on, I’d be snoozing six feet under the Nasashir crypts for twenty-some years now. You won’t even let me speak to them?”

He is-- older, broader, kingly, but in that moment Byleth wishes for nothing more than to send him shovelling shit in the monastery stables. “ _You fell off the horse, Claude._ ”

Miraculously, he has no retort - or chooses not to voice it. He exhales deeply, breathing through his nose until the fire in his eyes dies down. “I need more vellum.”

“They brought some,” Byleth responds, voice clipped. Claude pinches the bridge of his nose and disappears in the pantry.

He writes until well past midnight, the scratching of the quill boring into Byleth’s skull as if he were calligraphing on her very brains. The heavy autumn rainfall pounds against the glass of their unshuttered windows, not quite drowning out the ticking of the grandfather clock poised against the northern wall. The quill is chasing each tick, barely drawing away from the parchment, as if each thought unsaved was a thought lost. Claude doesn’t raise his eyes from the desk, and even if he did, she doesn’t know if she has any words for him. 

The rain dissipates, fog encroaching in the darkness as the ticking of the clock and the scratching of the quill resounds louder and louder, and Byleth cannot bear it any longer.

She walks out. The mists swirl around her instantly, and she breathes in their milk-thick moisture, revels in the silence that their tight press brings. Glancing down, she can barely see her palms. 

_Good,_ she thinks with just a little mindless obstinacy that is a twin of Claude’s, _let me lose myself in you. Let me drown._

The forest swallows her whole. Fir and poplar loom large as she grasps their bark for direction, half memory, half instinct guiding her up to Agabhainn. The fog undulates around her like a once-living thing, a ghost of a river; and with each drawn lungful Byleth feels more and more like a ghost herself. Just a silhouette of droplets suspended in the air, hovering in the currents of the river of time.

Inhuman. Endless. Immortal. The world fades away, its worries and dreams a mere swirling in the mist. 

This is what she is. This is what she has always been, a spirit hovering at the edge of the world, its flesh-bound tether loosening to a thread, only barely holding on to time and its unforgiving boundaries; and beyond the curtain of its fogged glass lie rest and relief.

 _Peace_. 

A faint echo ripples through the forest: her name. 

She pauses, hunting the direction of the sound that seems to come from everywhere at once, ringing with desperation. Before she determines it, the leaves underfoot crunch with hasty steps, a lantern hovering milk-white in the thick fog, and Claude calls again, panic twisting his voice.

“Byleth!”

“I’m here,” she says, and the smudge of the lantern swivels, changing paths at once. 

He resurfaces from the fog, his hair in curls on both sides of his face, blue-bruised eyes wild with panic. 

“Claude,” she says again, against the fog that swallows the sound, “I’m here.”

He rushes close. His face attempts to rearrange itself on reflex, a collected mask sliding on, but it cracks before it manages to fully smoothen. He is either too exhausted or no longer cares. “What possessed you to wander the forest on your own?”

“Claude,” she says again, and he shivers. Under the cape haphazardly bound at the neck, he’s in his shirtsleeves only, his trousers soaked to the knee by his wild woodland run. “Go to sleep.”

“Gladly. But here’s a prerequisite. I tragically need my queen to stay _alive_ while I do,” he says and reaches out to close his cold, ink-stained fingers around her wrist, pulling her closer. “Byleth, you mustn’t. Not now. Do you know how many people would gladly murder both of us, if they knew we were here alone?”

“How many?” Byleth asks, eyes narrowing, but allows him to push her head into his shoulder, feels the tension coiled there slowly recede. “Claude, we’re safe. This is the Daphnel territory.”

“I _know_ ,” he murmurs, burrowing his own face in her hair. “And we’re fighting a spy. Someone close enough to come and go into our own household. Do you _want_ another attempt on your life?”

Byleth presses her temple to the side of his neck. “I see,” she says. “So it befits _you_ well to fret over _my_ life.”

Claude sags over her. He is cold, growing colder, and soaked to the bone.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes. “I know. I just-- I don’t have time for this. I can’t stand the thought of them fighting my battles.”

“Claude,” Byleth rasps. He envelops her tighter, the lantern pushing into her back, and over her forehead, she can both feel and hear the chattering of his teeth. “Bed.”

“My, my, Lady Riegan,” he manages, as she pulls away and threads their elbows to lean against his side, “how-- _direct_.”

 _I love you,_ Byleth thinks as she ploughs them both through the fog, Claude a dead shivering weight at her elbow. His right hand is clenched on hers, tight to the point of pain, while his left holds up the swaying lantern. _My torchbearer. Pathfinder. Blazing with life for both of us. Without you, I--_

The cottage shines ahead, candles burning in the open windows, and her heart gives a terrible squeeze. 

He has lit the fire for her return. Then grew impatient.

They undress hastily, piling the wet clothes ahead of the burning hearth, and cling to each other with trembling hands. Byleth traces the outline of his too-visible ribs, the frantic flutter of his heart beneath; but before she pressed her lips to their stark bony ridges, Claude pulls her up to claim her mouth.

“Don’t run away from me,” he pleads, voice cracking. “I can’t bear--”

“Never,” she rasps, through a closing throat. “Never. But don’t you run away from _me._ ”

Claude gives a half-laugh, half-groan, and leads them into the bed. They fall into its feathery depths as one two-headed creature, Claude’s hair silhouetted by the quiver of the candle. Shining -- golden-headed -- burning, burning bright and so quick --

“I’ll stay _,_ ” he breathes into her mouth, and in his eyes she can see the gold and shadow of her own reflection, a half-transparent flicker of a ghost. “If you will.”

The hearth crackles softly, drowning out their gasps and the ticking clock. The fog recedes, falls, stars blinking into existence over the dark canopy of the forest, the jagged peaks of the mountains beyond.

  
  


_6._

_“Black teeth?” she asks as she briskly fits on her vambraces. Claude dispatches orders to the guards and they flood out of the corridors of the castle: one squadron to the north wing, one south, two more to search the main bulk. The fortress bustles awake with calls and torches. The two of them hurry down the circular stairway, checking for escape tunnels they had ordered at the refitting of the fortress._

_“A new guilt. Works for the southern separationists. Not the Edelgardians, the other ones, if you can keep track. They’ve been poisoning me,” Claude says with remarkable ease._

_For a moment the words ring in Byleth’s ears like a blow to the temple._

_“Poisoning you,” she repeats._

_“Smart, if you think about it. Certainly smarter than the morons that tried to kill a Crested baby once upon a time.” Claude’s eyes glint cold and deathly in the yellow light of the torch. “How do you kill someone with a Crest of Riegan? Not by a single blow, certainly, or anything quick-working. A long, slow build-up of asham-ra residue, though… If you’re patient enough, it can do very nicely.”_

_Asham-ra. The Agarthans have been spreading their new, deadly invention in the former Empire, latching onto the pain of the war. She draws a tight breath and squeezes his arms to the point of pain. “For how long?”_

_“A few moons,” he says, and she could just as well punch the life out of him herself. He draws away, eyebrows pinching. “Relax, Teach. I’ve been taking the antidote just as long. What’s more important is that I thought I knew what their plan was. But for them to target you--”_

_“You’ve been getting poisoned,” Byleth’s voice rises in pitch, “for --a few months--?!”_

_Claude stops mid-step. A still, cold mask is firmly fitted across his features. “Do you really want to have this conversation right now, with assassins in the Throat? I didn’t tell you, because you’d stop me, and that’d smoke them right out. And this needs to get done before the Unification’s anniversary. Any longer, and they’ll use the day to start an uprising--”_

_“Claude,” Byleth says, “you lied to me.”_

_The mask shivers. “I know. I’m sorry. But that was the only way I could see.”_

_The words ring hollow in Byleth’s ears as she watches him through a sudden barrier of silence. “This,” she says in a steady, emotionless drone, “will kill you.”_

_Claude stills. Swallows. Watches her in the darkness of the tunnel, taking in her empty face. She knows how eerily Rhea-like she becomes when she speaks like this. “Is that a prophecy, love? What will kill me?”_

_“Ambition,” Byleth says._

_Claude lets go of a tightly-held breath. “Right,” he says, cold and defiant, because her husband has not cared much for gods and destinies even before his people gave him the new name. “Eventually. Though, with some luck, I’d like to have built something first.”_

_Then something moves in the depths of the tunnel, an almost-silent footfall, and they lunge after it._

By the time the next supply convoy visits them, ploughing through knee-high snow that has blanketed both the cottage and the clearing around it, Claude has finished the supply of vellum and resorted to scribbling on epitaph pages torn out of cottage books. Byleth allows him. In turn, he does not chase her into the forest, where she wanders at dawn. Agabhainn calls to her still, but she avoids the quiet shimmer of her water; she’s made a promise.

Their unspoken truce lingers. The tension that lurks underneath doesn’t dissolve within it, but does ease. Something shifts in Claude’s demeanour, turning his steps slower, his words a little less biting. Perhaps it is the slow-settling confidence in knowing his letters are out there, reaching the people he wishes to reach, and would eventually circle back to him. Her husband can be a patient man, when he deigns patience worth his time.

Or, perhaps, she thinks, it is something different yet; something calculated more for her own sake, and found somewhere in the fog of the winter forest. Byleth cares little for her own appearances, and less now when there is no court to impress, but the glimpses of a face she finds at the surface of her tea are of a tired, haggard woman. Not quite grieving – she has nothing to grieve yet – but racked with a long-suffering kind of sorrow that has no answer and no cure.

Perhaps this is why, when she pulls him away from the writing desk and toward the bed, he does not protest nearly as much. More and more often he dozes off in the brocaded armchair of the little cottage study, a book he’d plucked out of the cottage bookcase resting spine-up on his chest, his expression loose enough it could almost be peace.

Byleth greedily carves the image of it into her mind. Twenty-eight years of age, and almost ten of them spent fighting wars. As generous as he is with it to others, peace is not something Claude von Riegan hoards for himself; nor does he grant it to his wife.

* 

As winter encroaches, the roof of the cottage grows heavy with icicles, frost matting the windows with fantastical shapes; Claude presses his warm palm to the glass, thawing a handprint to peep through, and chases her between the chairs of the parlour to slip his freezing fingers beneath her waistband.

“No, you don’t,” Byleth tells him, reaching out into the cauldron to pull out a dripping ladle, pretending not to notice the heaving of his chest.

Claude feigns terror, eyes flashing convincingly. “Not the _stew._ ”

“ _Oi,_ ” Byleth says, narrowing her eyes.

Claude grins, shameless. She aims carefully; then flicks the ladle, sending a wet potato flying into his eyes.

He dodges, the potato splattering into a brown smudge on the carpet. Byleth scrapes the beans from the ladle and takes another shot with her own hand.

“My, my,” Claude says, wiggling his fingers, “how the tables have turned. Byleth Eisner with a projectile and Claude von Riegan with a melee weapon. Next thing I’ll know, we’ll have you clamouring for a better world, and me winning your wars for you. Alas, not quite yet.“

He lunges forward, avoiding the swing of the ladle, and Byleth catches his right hand as it flies to her waist. Then she drops the ladle to the floor to wrench his other wrist behind his back.

“Oh _no,_ ” Claude says, sparks dancing in his emerald eyes. “I’ve been defeated.” Then he bends down to kiss her.

His tongue is _ice-cold._

Byleth wriggles away, but he holds her fast, drawing out the kiss with a grinning mouth. _Now_ she can see that on the other south-facing window, away from the handprint, there’s a round, wet mark.

“Rascal,” she murmurs. Then she plants a potato-slick hand on his cheek.

Laughter rumbles in his chest as he presses her close, smearing the stew between their faces, and she squirms in his warm, loose embrace. “Slob.”

 _I love you,_ Byleth wants to say, but it is almost too desperate for the warmth of him, the ease with which he holds her. _I want this. This. This is where time falls away._

  
  


* 

  
  
  


“Feeling any better?” asks Eleanor, passing her a crate filled with empty vellum, and Byleth flashes a tiny smile. In the adjacent bedroom, Claude is snoring softly.

“Too soon to say,” she says. The snoring loses its rhythm for a second, and when it returns, Byleth recognises a patently deliberate note in it. “But I’m hopeful.”

Eleanor pauses, looking down at the leather messenger bag strapped to her thigh. “Probably not my place to say, sire, but Lady Daphnel won’t be very sad if I’ll have… misplaced these letters on the way somewhere. You know how the bridleway gets in the winter.”

Byleth shakes her head. “I appreciate it. But you can leave them here.”

Eleanor nods and empties the bag onto the parlour table. There are six letters addressed to Claude, one each from Lorenz, Farbod, the three ministers of the united government, and from Judith herself. The seventh, written in Marianne’s gentle hand, is addressed to Byleth. 

“Good luck, General,” Eleanor says in the doorway, giving a crisp Red Steel salute. Byleth offers it back. “Lady Judith says your troops miss you sorely, with the tensions in Adrestia and whatnot. You think you’ll be back by spring?”

“That is the hope,” Byleth says with a minute nod.

“Hang in there,” Eleanor says and disappears in the swirling snowfall. The convoy departs shortly, wading through the ever-growing drifts that seem to close behind them the second they’re gone.

Claude immediately sticks his head out of the bedroom and snatches the letters, tearing into the seals with greedy fingers. “Opinions on the mercenary lady?”

“An old vassal,” Byleth offers, less a statement and more a placeholder for his inevitable stream of eloquence. Claude nods to himself as he devours Lorenz’s letter first, lips moving silently for a brief moment. 

His eyes grow colder, as though the ice from outside had caught them. 

“What is it, Claude?”

He straightens up to his full height, a casual mask frozen over his thinned face. “They haven’t caught the spy yet,” he says. “And these seals have been tampered with.”

Byleth breathes in and out. The air between them crackles with frost. 

“Should I give chase?”

Claude shakes his head curtly. “What good would that do? Say she’s the spy, with presumably a network in Daphnel. She doesn’t return, the network goes underground, we lose them. Say she isn’t, and not only do we sour relations with the Red Steel, we kindle a rumour that we’re erratic and paranoid. Now, if we’d known what the matters were in Daphnel, things would be different, but as it stands I have too little to make a move.” His lip twitching bitterly, he adds, “You made sure of that.”

Her fingers clench as she tries for patience. “Claude, you have moons’ build-up of poison in your body.”

“And?” he says.

“Hold the letter still,” she says. 

Claude sets his jaw and tightens his grip on the parchment, crinkling Lorenz’s elegant handwriting under his fingertips. Its shaking grows subtler, but remains. A flush rises to his cheeks.

“This means nothing.”

“Claude,” she makes out around a tight, furious knot in her throat. “You are not an unreasonable man. _See reason._ ”

“See--” He heaves, word broken in half as though it lodged itself in his throat, like a choking splinter of a bone. The letter crumples in his fist. “See _reason?_ I will tell you what the _reasonable_ thing to do is, Byleth. We shall ride to Daphnel now, and we shall speak to Judith about the Red Steel in her employ. We shall identify those that have Adrestian connections, find out who has been paying them, and then round up the entire network before the next Unification Day. That, love, is _reason._ This-- this is just your own selfishness.”

The room darkens in Byleth’s eyes. “My selfishness,” she repeats.

Claude crosses the distance between them to clench his shivering hands on her shoulders. “I am not getting better. This had been-- I may have made a mistake, but there’s no point dwelling on that now. But I have to think about the country, not just this. _You_ have to think about the country.”

Byleth yanks herself backwards. His fingers clench on air as he tries to give chase, but stops himself an inch away. “You are not getting better?”

He shakes his head curtly. “It hurts more every day. I imagine that is why they haven’t tried to kill us yet. Quieter if you just let the poison finish the job, right? And once I die, they’ll come for you. Now--”

“It hurts,” she repeats, inanely.

“Byleth, listen--”

“You,” she bites out, fury rising to feel in the empty space within her chest, “you _liar_ \--”

“For all the gods in heaven and below, listen to me!” Claude cries, voice raw with anger. “You’ve always known that, haven’t you? That this is the most important thing we will ever do. This country. _Our_ country. All these lives depending on us not to slide them into war and chaos again. We only have so much time to build those foundations, even less now, and you’ve shipped me away as though it all mattered less than--”

“Claude,” Byleth says, “are you dying?”

“Every day,” he says, his eyebrows pinched, his lips white. “Just like every other man. And I can’t afford to languish here any longer, no matter how important _this_ is for you.”

Byleth closes her eyes. Something hot and warm trickles down her fingers: blood from nails pushed too tightly into fists.

“I understand, I do,” Claude says. His chest is heaving, one hand pressed to his stomach as if he were trying to stem the flow of the words pouring out. “You want me to be with you, and Byleth, I-- in another life, I would’ve spent every waking moment baking you those sweet raisin cakes you love so much. We’d both be alive and well, and happy to languish in this peace. But,” and his breath stutters, “you don’t know what _this_ feels like. Even without the poison, I’m running out of time. There’s so much to do, and all we’ve ever struggled for could be obliterated in a second. I cannot stay idle any longer. I cannot.”

“Do you think I _want_ to watch you age and die?” Byleth bites out. “Do you think this is-- this is a _privilege?!_ ”

His throat shivers as he swallows, draws a long, steadying inhale. “At the risk of being cruel,” he says, “yes. Time’s a privilege.”

Byleth looks at him, then at the blizzard dancing outside of the frosted glass. A silent scream lodges itself beneath her ribs, almost tight enough to shatter the bones that trap it. Almost enough to explode her from within, finally freeing the ghost beneath. 

“Let’s go, then,” she says.

  
  


**7.**

The blizzard swirls around them. They less walk than stumble, Claude’s weight pressed against her shoulder, more inert with each step. And yet he walks still, teeth gritted in determination, ploughing a knee-deep trail between the whitened trunks of fir and poplar. Even despite the furs she’d shoved onto him, he is shaking, snowflakes resting unmelted on his bruise-blue lips. 

“How far,” he makes out between the chatter of his teeth, “to the bridleway?”

“Not far,” Byleth says, not looking at him. She is not cold; fury burns in her, steady and stirring ever higher. 

_Lysithea and I have analysed the antidote he’d been ingesting,_ Marianne had written. _He is a notable chemist, and I understand that he’d successfully designed cures for multiple poisons in the past. Even so, the asham-ra is based upon metals we have had little practice working on - the Agarthans still have the edge on us when it comes to technology. He had neutralised the immediate deadly effects, but that did not prevent the heavy metal build-up - which remains our chief problem. Even now, I have no solutions for you besides just letting his body get rid of the residue. We continue our work on it._

It is his fault from the start. But Byleth will not allow it. This man is burning through himself as though he were the only fuel within his reach; and if she cannot burn with him, she will at least offer kindling.

The ravine is little more than a gentle incline when buried under this much snow, Agabhainn resting silent and frosted over at its bottom. Claude stumbles over the edge, and she leans in to let him fall over her shoulder, wrapping his arms around her neck.

“I’ll carry you,” she says, and he makes a vague murmur of assent.

She lowers herself to the bottom of the ravine, where the river glistens with clear ice under the snow. Her boots scrape against it as she walks along it, each step falling heavier with two people's weight. The blizzard roars in her ears, swirling ribbons of snowfall twisting around her, the ice underfoot precarious and slippery. 

“This,” Claude breathes into her ears, a cold breath puffing up against her cheek, “is not the way to Daphnel.”

“No,” Byleth says, clipped. “Do you want to go alone?”

He stirs, strung against her back, but doesn’t protest. 

The white-lined cliffs of the ravine loom on either side, moving torturously slowly as she walks on. The incline increases, and soon Claude’s feet no longer drag in the snow behind her, instead hanging limply in the air, his entire body a dead weight clasped around her neck. She walks upstream, scaling increasingly steeper rocks.

“Where are we going?” Claude asks. Byleth purses her lips and does not answer. “...Do _you_ know?”

She does not. But she _does_ know that Agabhainn has been calling to her for a long time, and that answers only ever lie at the source.

And to reach the source, one must struggle upstream.

“Byleth,” Claude whispers, almost lost in the sounds of the swirling blizzard. She is silent. “Byleth. Love.”

“What does that even _mean_ ,” she snaps, gaze fixed firmly on the snowy stones beneath her feet. “ _Love_. I don’t think it means what you think it does.”

Claude is silent for a long time. Then his voice picks up, soft and rueful. “Then you tell me, _Teach_.”

Byleth swallows a knot in her throat. “ _Love,_ ” she manages, hoarse, “is honesty. It’s wanting to _stay_.”

“The night we found the assassin,” he says into her ear, his cold breath tickling her skin, “I had been waiting for him in my study. We were closing in on the entire group. The one I expected to attack me was the page that brought me poisoned meals. But he was late that night.”

“Instead he came to our chambers,” Byleth says, in a growl.

“And you were so-- so _serene,_ ” Claude says. “You asked _me_ how I was. As if all this filth, all this grind of life left you completely untouched. Like you were just a passer-by, and it didn’t _matter_ whether you lived or died on this gods-forsaken earth. And at that moment I knew that for all I’ve done, all that I’ll ever do, the greatest challenge I’ll ever have will be-- to make you a world worth _staying in._ A world you could _love._ One that doesn’t murder you, or drive you away.” His voice falters, falls into the whistling of the blizzard. ”Was I close, Teach? Was that love?”

Byleth takes another step forward. The incline rises more sharply still, and from across the forest lining the ravine she can hear a far-off thundering of water. 

“That,” she says, “is just hubris.”

He falls silent. When he speaks again, his voice is raw. “I prefer a world without me than a world without you.”

“At least you have a _choice_ ,” she says.

For a moment his chest does not move against her back. “Is that what you’re angry about? That I will get to die?”

“ _No_ ,” Byleth snaps. “I’m angry because you didn’t _tell_ me you were dying! If I am untethered from you, from _life_ , it is because _you_ have cut me off! I’m not-- I never--”

“I’m sorry,” Claude says, and for the first time, he wavers. “I just-- I was running out of time. I don’t know how to stop. The second I’ll stop, it’ll all crumble in front of me. I’m trying so hard, Byleth, and you _know_ it’s not just for you, you _know_ how many people rely on us making it work, and there’s so _little time._ ”

The river rises so sharply she is no longer walking, she is _climbing,_ Claude’s body dangling inertly at her shoulders. The waterfall thunders above them, ever closer. “You obsess over _time,_ ” she says, punctuating each word with a vicious tug upward. “And then you shave years off your own! Who is that going to help, Claude? The fact that you’re killing yourself? If it is all for _my_ sake, and _my_ future, then I would have been much better off running away with Flayn and Seteth to--”

“No,” Claude says. “Don’t finish that sentence, please.”

“Then don’t push me away!” Byleth cries, pulling them over the last foot of the cliff, and the arms around her shoulders tighten to the point of pain. As though he were straining all of his meagre strength to reach something through the water; silver and precious and slipping away.

“I love you,” he says, and at that moment the mists part.

Across a flat, snow-covered mountain shelf, a mass of clear, blueing ice rises at a sharp incline. A quick river runs hasty and noisy over it, trickling and sliding around the elaborate frieze of icicles before crashing at the bottom of the ravine and flowing down. It pours out of raw stone thirty feet above their heads.

 _Byleth,_ murmurs the waterfall. _Come,_ _Byleth. Come home._

“I’m here,” Byleth says. 

She unwraps herself from Claude’s embrace and steps through the curtain of water.

  
  


* 

The floor of the cavern tilts upward. Friezes of stalactites string in fine curtains above her heads. There is no visible light; and yet the cavern is not dark, grey and seafoam-green shadows flickering beneath her feet.

Byleth runs, heart seized by both longing and certainty.

Claude gives chase. His cries echo through the tunnel, ringing with first shock and anger, then panic. He struggles behind her, but he is weak, and the angle of the floor steep.

The _need_ thuds in her chest, replacing a heartbeat that had never dwelled there. She is carrying something else instead, something that had stirred time and time again, and time and time again she had gentled it asleep; but no longer. There is no denying the call that sings in her temples.

The tunnel ends abruptly with a white-shining doorway. It is frosted shut, sunlight streaming through it from the other side. Byleth reaches out; the ice undulates softly under her touch and parts like smoke.

On the other side is a grotto flooded by sharp wintry light. Through the wide-open mouth of the cavern, the mountains of Daphnel spread below, distant and black-and-white like lines of spilt ink. Between her and them is a shelf of bare granite and a sloping, shallow, brimming pool. The spilt water tumbles quickly toward the edge to rush over it in a clear waterfall.

At the centre of the pool, a small column-like island rises up to a man’s height, and upon it rests a simple earthen cup. The river pours out of it, silver and endless.

 _I remember,_ Byleth thinks, _how it was when I held it._

Time slowly unclenches its clutches, and through the haze of relief she can see a falling star. It plunges through the oceans, crashes against the seabed, reaches out into the cracked bowels of the earth, closing her fingers on a raw edge of a shell.

Ice water bites through her skin as she makes a tentative step into the pool, wading deeper toward the centre. The chalice wells and bubbles joyfully, endlessly, the source of past and future. There is no beginning nor end in an ocean, Byleth realises with a faint sense of annoyance at herself, because how could she _forget --_ and so Time had begun here to mark them both. The endless given direction, boundlessness gathered and focussed into a line.

Running, past to present to future, back into the vastness of the sea. 

“The Beginning,” she says, in soft awe, and traces the swirling symbol engraved on the chalice. The river pours over her chest, the cold giving way to something beyond. Something ancient enough to give her own life once. Enough to give him one, too.

A dull thud sounds behind her. Again, and again, a jarring interruption. The wall of ice sealing the entrance to the grotto splinters in a radiant pattern - and then shatters.

Claude heaves unsteadily on the other side, clutching a bleeding hand. He takes a half-second to take in the grotto, pool, and Byleth within it, and rushes through the sharp edges of ice. “Don’t. Please, don’t. Byleth, _please._ ”

He is very pale.

Byleth swallows, then tightens her hand on the chalice. “I can save you. Give you all the time you need.”

“And what good would that do?” Claude asks, voice cracking. “Do you realise how little that will mean if you-- if you _leave me?_ ”

“So,” she says, bitterly, “ _I_ will be forced to live without you, then, but you cannot--”

Claude curses, an ugly sound half-broken off by the shivering of his lips, and wades into the water. He less reaches for her than falls in her direction, and Byleth catches him on instinct, the chalice slipping out of her fingers to drown into the pool.

“You can’t,” he says, strangely lucid through the shattering of his teeth. “I won’t allow it. Please, Byleth, you promised. _Please._ ”

Byleth looks down at the small bubbling fountain that the drowned chalice is creating at her waist. A sense of loss and longing washes over her, so overwhelming that for a second she cannot draw breath.

She clenches her arms around his back and drags him out of the pool.

When she unwraps him out of his rapidly freezing furs and shrugs her own to cover his shivering body, Claude does not stop talking. She can hardly understand him, a torrent of apologies and promises in both Fódlani and Almyran, switching mid-sentence in feverish ramblings. Finally, she leans in and kisses him, choking off the sound from lips more grey than blue.

“I’m here,” she tells him, and he stills like a statue, empty breath hissing out of his mouth. “I’m here, Claude.”

“I’m sorry,” he manages after a long moment. Byleth pillows his inert head on her lap and casts a circle of flames to envelop them.

After an eternity, he stops shivering. Instead, he lies pliant in her arms, each breath more shallow than the last. Byleth cards her fingers through his hair, watching as the water from the pool begins to overflow the cavern beyond their circle of fire, the disturbed chalice bubbling up endlessly; and thinks of the inertness of corpses she held in her arms before.

“I need to ask you a question,” Claude says, very quietly.

“Yes?” she prompts when all that follows is more crackling of the fire. He lets out a humourless snort.

“But,” he says, “I am very scared of the answer. That’s the problem. I’ve known this for a long time. But you know I’m a coward, Byleth. It never bothered me before to be one, but now I’m scared to death of what you could say.”

Byleth looks away. The waterfall rumbles below them, and Claude is silent for another long moment before finally saying, “... Do you _want_ to go?”

She closes her eyes. Time coalesces around her tightly enough to strangle, a second skin dampening every move, cause welded shut to effect, past to future; but within it dwells _Claude,_ Claude’s voice and Claude’s dreams and Claude’s temper and Claude’s boundless love for life and everything that is of it, and for a second she wants to lie.

But then she looks down, watches his emerald eyes splinter to the very core, and knows that he would never forgive her for not meeting him here truth for truth.

She nods.

Claude says, “I see.”

Then he rolls away, dripping blood from his smashed right hand, and hides his face in his palms.

For a moment, Byleth falters. The flames die down, the water encroaching slowly until it reaches her toes again. 

“I won’t leave you,” she says, and her voice is weak and immaterial even in her own ears. “Never. Until death do us part, isn’t that what we promised?”

Claude shakes his head silently, and she trails off.

“See,” he begins, hoary, “when I tell a person something should be in a particular way, I like for it to happen. And I like to be there when it happens. I make decisions, and suffer consequences, and that’s what it should be. I’m a king after all, aren’t I? And most of the time, I know better.“ He draws a shallow breath and huffs it out in a chuckle. “... And to think I called you selfish.”

“Claude,” Byleth says. He turns toward her, and his face is ashen.

“If I asked you, right now,” he says, “to forget this and come live our human life together, you would say yes, wouldn’t you?”

Byleth nods. Claude lowers his palms away from his face, right hand slowly reclining into the water that had approached him. “So it is my decision, then? You’re putting yourself in my power? You’ll leave all of,” with a vague all-encompassing gesture, “of _this,_ those things I can’t even dream of imagining, past and future and all that ancient magic, and you’ll stay in my little human world and help me change it?”

He is beautiful, Byleth thinks as she extends her hand and he catches it, with his shining eyes and gold at his ears, an inverse comet; an earth-born star shot into the sky to light the way. And he doesn’t make it easy to love him, but she does anyway.

“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” she says. “I can love any world that has you in it.”

Claude draws a breath, and his eyes are, for a moment, two more pools of the chalice.

“Gods, I am a fool, aren’t I?” he says, voice thick. “Go. Drink.”

Byleth stares at him. Her fingers tighten to the point of pain on the smooth, blemishless skin of his right hand, healed sometime between his first word and the second.

There’s a subtle shift in the air, as though a mist lifted from between them.

Then she smiles, giddy, around the tears that begin to flow freely down her face, and pulls him up. 

They stumble into the pool hand in hand, wild, hysterical laughter and relief expanding in Byleth’s chest until she is clutching Claude’s cheek with one hand, the foot of the chalice with the other, and she is closing Claude’s own fingers on the edges of the chalice and saying, “You first.”

He blinks his own tears away, nods, and takes a long swig. Ice-cold water spills down his chest.

Time peels away, and for a moment Byleth can see the both of him - one shivering before her, and the other far away, his beard threaded with silver, eyebrows creasing fondly, emerald eyes darting both sharp and loving to gaze up through the curtain of clouds. Twelve archers surround him, a circlet of gold and green, and at his side is a woman whose face she cannot quite see; and at his feet spreads a kingdom from shore to shore, united and peaceful, one under a High King.

She closes her hands on his over the chalice, revelling at the way his eyes immediately flash with life as they hadn’t in moons, and then drinks instead from his own mouth. Claude dips her low, fingers suddenly strong and sure, and gives a soft, uncertain smile into her lips. 

“I love you,” Byleth says, or has said, or will always say. Time unfolds from her chest, bandages falling to reveal a new creature. “I will always be with you. Go. Heal the world.”

Claude’s eyes grow bright with the sudden light that fills the cavern. The chalice glows against his chest, brimming full, the river pouring over his clenched fingers.

 _Byleth,_ it says, clear as day, bright, welcoming. _Byleth._

“I’m here,” she says.

Then the light expands, and she is _free._

  
  


* 

* 

* 

**Epilogue**

  
  
  


Spring birds startle to flight as the royal wyverns land inside a clearing. Lorenz dispatches the guards quickly, and they move through the house in a methodical order, each suspicious substance carried into the open to be examined by the gremories. They uncover the vellum quickly.

“Poisoned,” Claude says, and Marianne nods. “Well, that explains why they gave us such a peaceful winter. What on earth are you doing, man?” he says to a particularly eager gremory whose hand is already coated in fire, the vellum turning the flame an ominous violet.

“Burning it, sire,” the gremory says.

“Now,” Claude says, “that’s just wasteful. You never know when you’re gonna need a perfectly good batch of poisoned parchment. Load it up, quickly. This goes straight into the Throat’s alchemy chambers. Anything in the kitchen?”

“Finely ground and mixed in with the flour,” Farbod says from the main door of the cottage, adjusting his gilded binoculars. His arms are dusted white to the elbow. “Or, as my dear baby brother could say after spending moons ingesting it, nothing at all.”

Claude raises his eyes to the heavens. “Are you ever going to find a new past-time?”

“Find? Maybe after spending a few moons staring it in the face, I’ll find it,” Farbod says.

“I will disinherit you,” Claude says, with feeling.

“ _Please,_ ” says Farbod. “Anything to spare me the joys of wyvern flight over those dreadful northern mountains. If you can find the right inheritance treaty, that is. I hear those are also hidden in vellum. Mind you,” he says before Claude opens his mouth, “if you have been poisoned so steadily, I would have expected to be having this conversation with your funeral tower. I suppose it does give some credence to your river water theory.”

“That is probably why he had not noticed,” Marianne points, graciously, and Claude offers her a grateful nod. “And you recall that no-one had expected the danger to come from Judith herself. We did not even want to consider that she would be the impostor.”

Claude’s smile slips away from his mouth. “No, we didn’t. Damn Agarthans.”

“Speaking of Lady Judith,” Lorenz says, stepping out from behind the corner of the house, guards trailing behind him, “shall we tend to our second task?”

“Yes,” Claude says, snapping back to himself. “Farbod, Marianne, keep searching through the cottage. We will be back in a few hours.”

With a few men called in from the search party, they pick a path into the forest and make their way down the mountain. Swathes of snowdrops and bluebells peek out from under melting snow, waning ice crunching under their travelling boots.

The mud of the down-sloping path is marked with small deer hooves. Claude spares a quick, dry smile at the sight; you could trust a deer to find a river. 

The forest is quite charming in spring, much more so than in the brief flashes of memory that his heavy metal-addled brain helpfully recorded. Small game chases away from their steps, but he doesn’t unsling his bow nor give an order.

“It’s here,” he says when the quiet murmur of the water reaches him. “I can walk the rest of the way alone.”

The men scatter obediently, fanning out to secure a wide half-circle around him. But Lorenz lingers, his narrow eyes trained on Claude’s hands.

“I said,” Claude enunciates, “I can walk the rest of the way _alone_.”

“I heard you,” Lorenz says, fussy as ever, before his lips thin to a single line. “But I lost one friend to this river already. I would much rather not lose another.”

Protest dies down in Claude’s throat. He shakes his head curtly, mutely, and continues his descend down the ravine, seeking out the muted sound of the waterfall. Lorenz follows close.

He had never truly seen Agabhainn so far north, not before the chalice. It had always been Byleth that fetched the water, Byleth venturing out into the forest. Ignoring the tight clench of his chest, he kneels at the rocky riverbank, pulls out a hunting knife, and cuts shallowly across a fingertip of his left hand.

The wound heals as quickly as he plunges it into the water. 

“Say it,” Claude says, head swivelling up to regard Lorenz with a beatific smile. Lorenz raises his eyes to the heavens above.

“This is an _important discovery, Claude--_ ”

“ _Say it,_ ” Claude says, wagging his well-healed finger, and Lorenz lets out a long-suffering sigh.

“You were right, Claude. There. Are you pleased with yourself?”

“Quite,” Claude says, grinning, and then the smile slowly dissipates as he follows the line of the river up into the heavy-set chasm of the mountain.

The sun-dappled canopy is suddenly jarring, throttling something in his chest, nauseating and strangling like the poison he’d both carried and put there himself.

A hand settles on his shoulder.

“We’ll heal Judith with this,” Lorenz says. “The spies are gone now. We can go back to celebrate the Unification in peace.”

“Yes,” Claude says, “very good.” Mechanically, he adds, “If Lysithea’s theory is correct, then the healing properties reduce downstream. We will blockade the river fifteen miles ahead of Daphnel to determine where it dissipates, exactly. If all goes well, we may eradicate disease from our lands for good. Wouldn’t that be a good legacy to go along with the Unification?”

Lorenz gives a tight-lipped smile. “I shall believe it when we see proof on the larger scale, but you have turned me more willing to believe your pipe dreams than I once was.”

“One more worthy legacy,” Claude says, patting the hand on his own shoulder. “Do you want to take the reins on this endeavour?”

“I could, if you wished me to,” Lorenz says. “But don’t you want to oversee it yourself?” 

Claude shakes his head, smiling a little sadly. “And then I poison myself again and what happens? The world is bigger than my head, Lorenz. It took me quite some time to realise it, but I think I’m getting there.”

Above them, a mountain lark begins to trill. Claude cranes his head up to seek him out, a faint fleck of grey against the blue sky, and catches a glimpse of Lorenz’s face. “What is it?”

Lorenz straightens up to his full height, chest puffing up. “If you dare wade into this river of ancient magic to disappear on me as well, you oaf--”

Claude’s laughter rings through the ravine, drowning out his words. Then he jumps to his feet, shaking his head in a single gesture that is at once sincere and mocking and a little sad, and flicks Lorenz in his immaculate kerchief. “And leave you two fools in charge of my kingdom? Not in this world.”

Lorenz huffs, a little placated. Then he gives Claude’s shoulder a single squeeze and turns away wordlessly, climbing up the ravine. The vivid colours of his coattails flash through the shrubbery for a moment longer, stark against the muted green, and then disappear.

Claude exhales silently and steps into the river. The water rolls into his tall hunting boots, stains his jodhpurs from gold to a dark brown, and rolls past him in a quick current.

“Byleth,” he whispers, a half-murmur. “Byleth, love--”

Mists rise from Agabhainn, coalescing into something impossibly light in front of him. He reaches out, heart in his throat, and clenches his shivering fingers on a ghostly outline of a woman before she fades into flesh. She enters the world moulded around him, her head filling out the aching vacuum beneath his chin, her arms leaned out of nothingness already clasped around his back.

He doesn’t know if he cries out, or weeps, or simply holds her; but the aching, gaping hole in his heart, the bit of him that is more used to _missing_ than _having_ , slowly inches to stitch itself back up.

She rubs soothing circles against his shoulders, solid and human.

“You’ve filled out again,” she murmurs in his ear, sounding a little awestruck. Claude gives a little wet chuckle. 

“A few moons of non-constant poisoning do that to a man,” he says. The next words run out of him before he manages to give it thought. “Will you come back? I--”

 _I die without you,_ he thinks, and swallows it down along with a thick knot in his throat. “I miss you.”

“You can come to me,” Byleth says, and absurdly, there’s _laughter_ in her voice. “Anytime.”

“I have a _kingdom to run,_ ” Claude says, and winces immediately at the sharp note of his voice. “I would love to, but--”

“I _know,_ ” she murmurs into his chest, warm and happier than he’d seen her in years. “I’ve _seen_ you. The truth of you, all of it. You’re so beautiful, Claude. Almost as beautiful as the world that will come to be.”

“Byleth,” Claude says, raw.

She lets go, regarding him with a soft, unchanged smile. Her eyes shine with life, hair curling over her shoulder in a seafoam-green curtain to fall over her waist. Undeniably human; and _yet--_

“You misunderstand,” she says, very gently, her warm hand coming up to cradle his cheek. “My shining king. You can come to me _anytime._ ”

And Claude _understands_.

His mind gives a little lurch, tilts, and spins around its axis.

“ _Wh-- no,_ ” he says, eloquently, and Byleth laughs, covering her mouth with her hand. He grabs it, pulling it to his own chest. “You didn’t. No. _Did you?_ ”

“You drank from the chalice,” Byleth says, still laughing, but her eyes are gentle and _endless_ and Claude might very well keel over, or use his newly discovered _forever_ to reach out and spend the rest of eternity to cover them with kisses--

She pulls at him, and Claude follows, chasing her mouth as she laughs and wiggles away and gets nowhere as he steals a kiss after a kiss after a kiss.

Time falls away as they step out of the river, hands joined. Across the welling mists, there is a rolling emerald hill, and seven tall trees atop it; an oak, a hawthorn, an ash, a poplar, a beech, an elm, and a cypress; and a meadow dotted with white and silver flowers, one looking so soft and welcoming Claude lays down in it immediately. Byleth reclines against him, her hand resting over his beating heart. 

As he gazes up, there is no sky; or rather, everything is the sky, the flowers around him glistening with starlight, the trunks of the trees rising up like axes of seven worlds. Claude lets out a quiet, awestruck sigh.

He turns to Byleth, only to find her watching him already, her expression impossibly soft. “Everything loves you,” she says, “The world-- the universe-- loves you so much, Claude, and all that’s within it, and you love it right back.”

“Are you everything?” he says, laughs, and kisses her again, feeling silly. “Of course you are.”

Time stretches endless, silver-bright, planets revolving around them, cities and empires built and fallen, as they roll across the soft emerald grass; and for a moment he cannot tell his pleasure from hers, her mind from his, as something greater takes hold and he knows, for a shining second, all that there ever was and shall be--

“Claude,” Byleth says, and for a moment _he_ is everything, he is the universe; and the universe loves Byleth, helplessly.

“What are those?” he says, pointing toward the horizon, where a chain of mountains higher than Oghma rises grey and blue against the silver of the not-sky. Byleth smiles.

“We can find out,” she says. “When you’re ready.”

Claude nods, taking her hand, another eternity passing between them.

They amble towards the river almost begrudgingly, with lingering touches and kisses stolen in between meandering steps. But the water finally claims him again, and at once the humanity pours into him: and for all the starry, cosmic light of the world beyond, he welcomes the greying green of the forest and the cold sting of the river.

He clambers up onto the slippery bank of Agabhainn, Byleth’s eyes following him fondly. She lingers even as the mists fall, her hand steady and sturdy in his.

Claude holds it fast, suddenly terrified of letting go. “Can I-- will you stay?”

“Do you want me to?” Byleth says; and at once he thinks about the silver expanse of stars, the rolling undulation of the empires of things grander than the whole of humanity each; and he cannot bend his neck into a nod.

Byleth’s eyes soften. “Oh, _Claude,_ ” she whispers, reaching out to cup his jaw. Her thumb swipes at the wet trail over his cheeks. “Call on me. Anytime, anywhere, I will come. And when you are ready--”

He presses his lips to hers, less a kiss and more s seal of a promise. “I will.”

“I love you,” Byleth says.

“I love you too,” Claude says; and she smiles, the skin around her eyes crinkling in a heartbreakingly human way, before she fades back into the river.

Claude wipes his face with the feel of his hand. Then he bends with a groan to wash it, the water cold enough to sting at the corner of his eyes, and climbs out of the ravine. On the far end of the path, some of Lorenz’s motley outfit still shines defiantly against the shrubbery.

“Lorenz,” Claude calls, and Lorenz turns around. He startles for a moment, eyes rounding as they fly to Claude’s face. 

“Where on earth--”

“Can’t a guy keep a secret?” Claude says. “Make it twenty miles ahead of Daphnel. And I’m gonna need some non-poisoned vellum. Do you think I could get some around these parts?”

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> Some post-reading music: [Beloved, let us love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8W16DofviA&feature=youtu.be)
> 
> Thanks for reading, y'all. I hope you enjoyed it. Would love to hear your thoughts!
> 
> [Yell at me on Twitter!](https://twitter.com/wearwind_ao3)


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